What Is PHP?

 What Is PHP?

PHP was in development in 1994, when creator Rasmus Lerdorf wanted a better way to administer his personal homepage. It all began as a few CGI binaries that Lerdorf used to build several interesting applications. This in itself isn’t so exciting, especially since early forms of PHP couldn’t even interface with a database! Regardless, Lerdorf started what would become a very prominent web development language.

From thereon out, PHP became an open source piece of software that anyone could contribute work on. Over the years developers have added quite a bit of functionality to the language overall. Through all the changes that occurred over the years, we can now describe PHP as the following:

Server-Side Scripting Language – In addition to being a scripting language, PHP is a server-side scripting language. This essentially means that PHP runs on the web server end of things (Which is why you should take advantage of our free hosting if you don’t have hosting already!). As we’ll learn later, PHP is processed on the server and then output to the browser after a request is made.

Dynamic – PHP is a dynamic language, which is to say that it can change based on what we need it to do. On the other hand we have static languages like HTML, which don’t allow us to do things like pull and store information from a database. Dynamic languages are quickly becoming standard among web applications, with PHP at the forefront.

Object-Oriented Programming – A buzzword in the programming industry is object-oriented design. Under this principle, the PHP is able to create “objects” that interact with each other. Object-oriented design isn’t necessary, but many supporters claim that using it helps organization and functionality in an application. We’ll review the topic more in future chapters, no need to worry about this topic just yet.

LAMP – An architecture called LAMP describes the usage of four popular technologies to create functional web applications. The P can stand for several other competing languages, but PHP generally takes the name in addition to Linux, Apache, and MySQL. For now, we don’t need to delve into such topics; but it’s good to note LAMP philosophy has dictated the way many web applications have been created.

Free-Form Language – Lastly, PHP is a free-form language. A free-form language will not observe whitespace when being output to the browser. This is apparent in HTML as well, where we can spank the Space bar as much as we want and not see any extra spaces when viewing the HTML in a browser.

What Can PHP Can Do?

What is PHP? So far, we’ve established that it is a programming language designed for creating web applications. It serves up dynamic content, works on the web server in the operation, and supports new-fangled principles such as object-oriented design. That’s all great, but what can PHP do exactly?

Take a look around, and we can see the results of PHP everywhere. It is estimated that PHP is in use on over 20 million different websites, and over a million different web servers (including ours!). We use PHP in applications such as simplifying templates, using user registration systems, storing and receiving information into a database, and even other exciting such as editing images on the fly.

PHP is used in many reporting and business applications, where built-in graphing and image creation can take place. Oddly enough, one of the first PHP applications ever created was an application to track statistics and report results in a convenient manner (Think back- remember Rasmus Lerdorf? He used his Personal Home Page language to create his own statistics counter!).

Thanks to recent years of innovation, technologies such as AJAX have made it easier to offer an easier experience for users of web applications. AJAX is used to silently load and store all sorts of information- whereas it was previously required to refresh the webpage or navigate to multiple other websites. We’ll learn more on AJAX in future sections, which will be a particularly fun section and something to look forward to in learning.

What Does PHP Do For Website Development?

Developers have a lot to benefit from PHP- and not just a surplus income. Rather, developers are able to take advantage of decreased development times, ease of use in deploying applications, and a fantastical support from a very large community.

To help further the process of developing a web application, multiple frameworks are available for usage. Frameworks reuse many repetitive tasks, such as connecting to a database or storing basic information. Frameworks should not be used until PHP itself is learned, and a learning curve for most PHP frameworks can be anywhere from a day to a week or more.

Also worthy of noting is the fact that some frameworks have support for security measures that programmers ignore on a common basis. PHP itself is not an insecure language, but it does leave holes where improper developers might leave mistakes in programming. Frameworks help cover up such holes, but regardless of the fact proper security tactics are good to learn as PHP itself is learned. (Don’t worry, we teach all the security topics you’ll need for PHP web applications.)

Closing Comments

PHP has been in development for a long time and there are plenty of things to learn about the language overall. Rest assured, we’ll learn more about everything discussed in this introduction to PHP with the coming chapters. Next up: what you’ll learn from this course and what you can do with the knowledge obtained therein. 

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